JERUSALEM — 'And now we go over to our correspondent Xxx Xxx live on the ground. ... Xxx, give us your feeling of what's happened there."

How familiar is that - the telecast transfer from the studio anchor to the correspondent at the scene of the latest war event?

Facts or feelings? Which constitute the best basis for good reporting of a conflict situation? Doubtless, feelings are more powerful while the reliability of facts is also subject to the old academic adage that "every fact presumes a theory as to its relevance, and a value judgment as to its significance."

Caution about the relativity of facts is worth bearing in mind when considering the question: What's the real goal of international television reporting of a conflict situation like Israel's recent war in Lebanon?

Is it to try to understand the war, the reasons it has broken out, the direction in which it might be headed, its implications for the wider world?

Answer yes to the first question and coverage of the Israel-Hezbollah war must be deemed perfectly satisfactory. If, however, yes is the answer to the second question, the recent coverage has been nothing short of catastrophic, almost a dereliction of journalistic duty.

"If you don't identify with my pain then your reporting is biased," is a charge often leveled against reporters from both sides of a conflict. Too often reporters duly fall into the trap. Who can expect a reporter to grapple with the causes of war or its direction when perspective is lost in a welter of charge and counter- charge of bias?

It is important to show the pain of war, the suffering of war. And live television is immensely powerful in conveying the images of horror. But if the entire focus is on victims, only viewers who choose to line up with one side of the conflict are satisfied.

This also allows the reporter to take refuge in a safety net of feelings, comforted by being able to identify with all "the victims." The result is often "see- what-you-see-and-you-can-see-just-how-horrible-it- all-is" kind of reporting. The reporter is no more than a viewer, he has no edge over those watching the broadcast in understanding beyond the horror. Assessments are reduced to the tautology that "war is hell."

The focus on suffering also serves those whose basic belief is that war is simply a war crime and that no war can ever be justified. TV war reporting turns into a war of feelings and reduces coverage to victimology.

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Ted Turner, the legendary founder of CNN, once remarked that had his cameras been at Auschwitz to report live that would have helped stop the gas chambers. Possibly. But what if the camera focuses on suffering where evil is not so patently clear? What about circumstances in which there is a fine line between, say, exercising the legitimate right of self-defense and an unwarranted act of aggression.

When we worked for CNN, network enthusiasts of greater reporter-viewer interaction invited viewers to ask for the digest of a conflict "in one minute." We were duly asked to explain the Middle East conflict in 60 seconds.

So not every report about every rocket that slams into an Israeli town, nor the result of every Israeli strike on a suspected Hezbollah stronghold that turns out to be but a residential building, can include rival claims that go back centuries and millenniums.

But even if it is impossible to convey every single horrifying image on the screen within a broader context of developing events, the broadest context needs, at least, to be in the reporter's mind.

Mind, not heart, mind you.

The reporter needs to be more than merely the viewer's representative pronouncing instant on-site judgment on the horror. The key is reporter understanding beyond the picture, but without any breach of another fine line - that between understanding and justifying. Ultimately, the reporter's goal is to increase understanding of what we are seeing, not color our viewing through more and more emotion.

Dispassionate is the key word that is missing, but that is not the same as saying a reporter does not feel.

The goal is to help the viewers make up their minds as to whether they ought to cry or not; viewers should be able to decide for themselves how much they choose to identify with the victims and therefore, perhaps, be left in a better situation to pass judgment on the morality and on the rights and wrongs of the conflict.

The central question that TV-news executives, correspondents and viewers need to be asking is not whether tests of fairness and an absence of bias have been met but whether the news reports helped answer questions on what the war might be about.

The cost of TV coverage giving in to victimology is steep. It skews views, not just of viewers, but of decision makers. We the viewers, they the decision makers, become victims of victim-dominated coverage.

A version of this article appears in print on August 17, 2006, in The International Herald Tribune. Today's Paper|Subscribe